You've read her books about her family, yes? "Life Among the Savages" and "Raising Demons?"

I haven't, actually. I must remedy that!

Is her Sarah adorable and bright, with a will of pure steel and a deep streak of demon imp?

Is her Sarah adorable and bright, with a will of pure steel and a deep streak of demon imp?

Her Sarah is the textbook illustration of Triple Scorpio. She's kicked out of kindergarten for putting a hex on the teacher. And she takes baby brother Barry to places - well. Go read. Brilliant stuff.

Out the door, for now...

Do you guys always follow every idea you get? If not, why not? Allyson, I think I still have the drawing...

erika, nope, not if you're referring to story ideas. If not, mostly because the feel of it is wrong for me, no matter how much it pinged me to begin with.

I follow every idea I get. Sometimes it leads me to the end of a very bad paragraph, but it's never a waste of time, in my head.

Heh. Allyson, nope, I don't think any idea is ever a waste of time. But I've been doing this for so long now that I've learned to sense, usually, what's going to eat a chunk of time and slim energy reserves and then peter out, because it just isn't where I'd go as a writer, or do well.

So, with those, I extract the bits that ping me hardest, and try to use them. The rest, I salute and send on their way.

I don't think I've definitively ruled out any of my ideas, but some of them are so deeply back-burnered I won't be surprised if they've lost their lustre (luster?) by the time I get to them. I'm very much afraid I've permanently outgrown that epic fantasy I was writing at 24, which is too bad, because I'm still fond of the characters and the worldbuilding, just not the plot and the too-obvious resemblance of the hero to the guy I had a crush on way back then. Just before I met Dylan. But I really want to get to that time-travel baseball novel eventually, because I feel like I could adore it almost as much as I do the WIP, even though it'd take a whole different voice and style than the niche I'm currently carving myself.

Oh, I've had some really, really bad ideas. In the right hands and head, they could be good ideas, I'm sure.

I don't follow up every story idea I have, at all. But I have found that I don't throw them away -- if I've scribbled something on a piece of paper, it sometimes changes into something else, later, and I see that it needed more plot, different characters, what have you. Still, I have a file full of ideas that I've never tested -- a lot of historical stories, some children's stuff, some nonfiction essays. Right now, as Deb said, they're not going to work no matter how much I loved them when they bloomed. It's nice to keep them in a little pile, though, and revist them once in a while.

The biggest problem I find I have is not so much with unsuitable ideas, as with ideas who've lost their tooth. A few unfinished novels that got stuck on hiatus for whatever reason, circs within or beyond my control. They'll probably never get written now. A pity - not bad, any of them.

Back to work on Cruel Sister.

edit: 1000 words. A nice slow grind.

Feh.